1. The Book Review praises a novel by a trans author, even as the same paper pushes anti-trans policies.

2. When I write, I am not building an edifice. I am collecting pebbles.

3. ‘Veronica’ names the girl I was until about the third grade. I hold compassion for her.

4. I’m not especially interested in Pride this year, unless it will feature trans women lobbing bricks through windows.

5. Certain facets of womanhood seem out of reach, but ‘mom’ fits snugly, like a pair of shoes in my size.

6. Everyone loves a transition narrative of heroic struggle, but mine was mostly long stretches of blankness.

7. They will weaponize a deadname when it suits them.

8. They adore a trans woman provided she is glamorous. The one caveat: She must be fabulous at all times.

9. Anger blunts my softer emotions and makes my writing ugly. But I don’t want to share any more sensitive feelings. You can’t have them to feast on.

10. The problem of writing, for me, is to pretend that I’m not writing. Or rather, not be guided by what’s already on the page.

11. Transitioning created a form of double vision. Past and future overlay, but don’t quite align, like misregistered printing plates. Hence the gradual work of re-remembering.

12. In my father’s circle of theatrical homosexuals, orbited several older women. They were vague, flighty, wore flamboyant scarves, had the physiques of retired ballerinas. I fear the gay men in that group did not take them very seriously, but I adored them, and they took a liking to me. Instinctively I took them as role models.

13. I’ve been obsessively doing crossword puzzles, four or five puzzles a day. I know all the 3- and 4-letter words, like ODE and EWER. I do them to stay away from social media.

14. Crows often recur in my writing. Not as symbols of anything, but as observers. I feel that a crow could explain my writing to me, if I could understand its caws.

15. If I’m being honest, I tell my therapist a lot of half-truths.

16. Metacognition is thinking about thinking, but regular cognition is already high up the neural chain. Writing is like that too. It strives beyond itself.

17. If I can get over my fear of entering the women’s restroom, I will be free. But then it will just be something else.

18. Growing up, I knew there were transsexuals, who had sex changes, and transvestites, who wore women’s clothes. Also: If you were gay, wearing women’s clothes was drag, which was fun. But if you were straight, it was a sex fetish.

19. A proposition is a sentence with a truth value. Analytic philosophy’s original sin?

20. A lot of people are talking about trans joy.

21. If you’re supposed to have a stream of consciousness, ADHD is more like a
floodplain.

22. Older men strike up conversations with me. Sometimes it’s charming, sometimes not.

23. I search for butch/femme romance novels to read while I recover from FFS. Then I feel like an interloper and close all the browser tabs. And then I feel foolish for doing that. And now I feel foolish typing this entry.

24. It is fascinating to watch men talk with other men. How they jockey for position. Sometimes it is subtle, often overt.

25. At certain junctures, I’ve written something that I needed to read in order to learn something about myself.

26. I’ve published some pieces that were direct attempts to write like a certain book: William Burroughs’ The Wild Boys; Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline; Emerson Whitney’s Heaven.

27. Writing about writing may be a cliché, but what about writing about writing about writing? That’s a fun infinite regress.

28. Today I’m wearing the same dress I had on when a woman threatened to call the police if I didn’t leave the playground with my son. Thus I can measure the progress of my transition.

29. When I started wearing a skirt in college, guys would catcall or try to look up my skirt. I still thought of myself as a boy, so it didn’t register to me as sexual harassment, although I suppose it was.

30. Sometimes my brain creates the thoughts that it wants to consume. But not always for the good of my mental health.

31. It’s like fighting the ocean. I can send up a prismatic spray with my arms, but that’s about it.

32. If cis people could see transness as something beautiful, the world might be very different.

33. All statements are provisional, all facts unstable.

34. This piece that I’m writing, or rather accumulating, is like a nest that a mouse builds for herself out of scraps of paper, and serves a similar purpose.

35. “Feminine” style is a cluster of attributes: Color, adornment, attention to detail, a certain softness. It is not necessarily sexual but often interpreted as such. Incidentally it defines the boundaries of masculinity as a negative space. Trans women are criticized for having it or for not having it. For me it always feels close to home.

36. Today I wept in front of my friend.

37. Growing up, I was told a lot of lies about America. I believed some of them.

38. I don’t really know how to do a tarot reading, but late at night I draw The World,“the self-knowing spirit.” It seems an auspicious card during this self-imposed period of hibernation.

39. Do I have the courage to be visible? Do I have the courage to disappear?

40. Nature has infinite patience because nature is inexorable.

41. My urge to add one more thing shows a lack of trust.

42. Any style can devolve into a mannerism. Even (or especially) when trying to avoid “style.”

43. I am too self-conscious to keep a diary. Who is the narrator addressing?

44. I respond angrily in my own mind to some silent, invisible observer.

45. I write, without being a writer. I believe, without having beliefs.

46. I am in my Água Viva phase, apparently.

47. Contractions make prose choppier, like someone jabbing their finger.

48. Trannies not tyranny.

49. My FFS will be a demarcation, perhaps.

50. When I think of sex, there are still two bodies, one of them mine, alas.

51. I’ve written stories with too many commas and stories with not enough commas. It has to do with breath.

52. The things that I want feel wrong, because I want them.

53. Sometimes I rehearse speeches in my head that I never give. But it gets them out of my system.

54. A cis person once reassured me that in many cultures, transgender people are revered for having sacred wisdom. I still resent that comment. Look, I’m a white lady. I don’t, nor claim to.

55. My interest in tarot is extremely superficial, to say the least, but it nurtures the small part of myself that would otherwise be tempted to go to church.

56. I come from a family that never believed in holding funerals. Our dead are mere absences.

57. I set calendar notifications and then startle myself. It’s like the past warning me about the future.

58. I will look back on the current phase of my life as the segue to the next, but it does not yet have that quality.

59. These sentences are like mushrooms; I’m trying to ignore them.

60. The ideal sentence implies several unspoken ones.

61. When does a pause, drawn out, become a silence? Do you answer it, just to break the tension?

62. My neighbor puts up American flags. I know he doesn’t intend for them to feel threatening.

63. I’ve read Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp’” more than once, but I still don’t get it.

64. In novels, I could project myself into the lives of the heroines. For a long time, that was enough.

65. Editing is when untruths start to creep in.

66. I watch a documentary about punk rock and it’s a sea of sweating young men, Eros sublimated into aggression. For a brief period, my one foray into masculinity.

67. My existence is an “issue” about which cis people are still trying to reach “consensus.” (They want to know where I’m planning to pee.)

68. To blossom is to be vulnerable. My reflex is to curl up like a pill-bug.

69. I understand the urge for a grand unifying narrative, but then I think of nature and the slow accumulation, drop by drop and strand by strand.

70. My backup plan to teach preschool seems far fetched.

71. I can’t nap and write at the same time, but napping is when I gather my thoughts into manageable bundles.

72. For most of my life, my goal was to disappear, and that’s a hard habit to break. “You deserve to take up space” — but I have to learn to be OK with that.

73. “Gradually a portrait emerges of a woman who …” But that’s for others to say.

74. A perfumed box in which throbs my bloody heart.

75. Having transitioned in middle age, women compliment my appearance and men, as a rule, do not, which suits me fine.

76. Estrogen is a potion of tears.

77. Transgender children should not exist, Supreme Court rules.

78. Aesthetic sensibility is a quality of the nervous system as much as the mind.

79. Last night I drew The Chariot, “conquest on all planes.”

80. Certain feelings are like voids — my eyes know to look away.

81. The key to all of my certainties is that I could just as easily be wrong.

82. I have various superstitions and magical amulets, although I consider myself a rationalist. I know they don’t “work,” per se.

83. I created a playlist named “anthems!” and I listen to it as needed.

84. My attraction to women never felt straight. I couldn’t relate to the way men talked about sex. As if they couldn’t actually see the women they desired.

85. By nature I’m earnest and take things too literally.

86. I’m no longer embarrassed to admit that I can’t stand horror films. I hate being traumatized by a movie.

87. HRT flatlined my libido. Sometimes I feel its shadow lurk like a forgotten god.

88. I get why people disparage girlboss feminism but I love wearing my “Strong Woman” T-shirt.

89. How do I feel about America? A lot of emotions that add up to nothing.

90. In high school I wrote a term paper on Schopenhauer. For several weekends I went to the main branch of the New York Public Library. What I mostly remember is the cathedral hush of the reading room.

91. Punctuation guides the reader. Too much punctuation constrains the reader.

92. When I go onto social media, I remember how much I hate everything. When I stay away, I remember the opposite.

93. I think of minimalist sculpture as a kind of ideal. There’s more to life than matter and geometry, but those two things can take you a long way.

94. When my thoughts start to sound like I’m narrating, that’s when I know I’m lying to myself.

95. Truth is fleeting; and language always slightly too slow.

96. Dworkin’s Woman Hating jolted my eyes open in high school.

97. Wanting to change is a conundrum, because if I could change myself, I would change literally everything, but that would mean the death of the self.

98. Words are bundles of associations. If you tug at a sentence, it can unravel in front of you.

99. I’m scared that I still won’t pass after FFS, and I’m scared that I won’t allow myself to believe that I pass, and I hate that I care.

100. I admire the chess grandmaster who fought a computer to a draw and then abruptly forfeited the match. The computer could only calculate the next move, forever patient.

101. The newspapers run images of Fascist pornography. Naked bodies in cages.

102. A large part of my transition has been learning to care for my body as if it’s mine. Doing my makeup is a ritual to that end.

103. I have a charm bracelet that spells out B-R-A-V-E. I wear it whenever I need to do something that scares me. I don’t wear it too often lest it lose its potency. But I am wearing it today.

104. Womanhood cannot be contained if its borders are permeable.

105. I wish my anger were honed and polished. Instead it is like shards of smashed pottery. One day archeologists will ponder its intended use.

106. Transphobia must proceed from the position that transsexuality is a willed behavior. This belief allows transphobes to hold their animus with a clear conscience.

107. My feet twitch when I am nervous, on stimulants, or highly focused.

108. I take a last photograph of my face, sans makeup, before surgery.

109. A beloved author tells her followers to snap pictures of trans women in bathrooms and post them to social media.

110. The Three of Wands. Successful enterprise. Looking forward, across the sea.

111. My friends text me words of encouragement.

112. I have bathed and fasted.

113. In the pre-op waiting room, time stops.

114. The operating room, with its sterility and anonymity is a sacred space.

115. With my eyes closed I shuffle the tarot deck and draw a card.